From neo-racism (racelessness, colour-blindness) to postraciality

The concept of neo-racism can be considered an advanced chapter in the theorization of postcolonial discourse. Balibar (1991a, 17) reminds us that racism is a socially constructed phenomenon that is historically essential and has long lasting effects on the lives of its victims.

Racism – a true social phenomenon inscribed through practices (forms of violence – contempt, intolerance, humiliation and exploitation), in discourses and representations which are so many intellectual elaborations of the phantasm of prophylaxis which are articulated around the stigmata of otherness (name, skin colour, religious practices) – thus it organizes affects (e.g. irrational ambivalence) by conferring upon them a stereotyped form as regards both their objects and their subjects.

For Balibar (1991b, 43), the ambivalence of racism is exercised as a heritage of colonialism that is, in reality, “a fluctuation of continued exteriorisation and ‘internal exclusion’ … the interiorisation of the exterior” and “exteriorization of the interior”. In other words, racism is practised in the simultaneous assimilation and rejection of the other. Moreover, Bhabha (1994) asserts that racism is founded on, but at the same time undermined by, the ambivalence of the colonizer, who fears, and

15 so distinguishes himself from, the colonized Other while simultaneously needing or desiring the Other to be recognized as master or superior. Bhabha terms this paradox “hybridity” (ibid.). The result of this ambivalence is the creation of a mimic man (racial object), who is “almost the same, but not quite” (ibid., 127) (also see Mignolo, 2009). The discursive instability in racial discourses that both Bhabha and Balibar observe offers the possibility for intervention, resistance and the interruption of racial dominance by racialised groups and individuals. Balibar (1991a, 22) argues that neo-racism is a “displacement of the problematic … which naturalises not racial belonging but racial conduct”. Within neo-racist discourse, the concept of race is often replaced by the concept of culture (and sometimes community), as culture does not have the same socio-political baggage as race in racism (Lentin & Titley 2011; Dei & Calliste 2000).

Moreover, cultural difference is viewed as something negative that threatens rather than enriches cultures and nations and which should be eliminated either through the expulsion of the Other or his/her assimilation. Neo-racism is an expressive Eurocentric notion of progress and civilization in which the hierarchy of biological (race) is reconstituted in the very type of criteria applied in conceptualising the difference between cultures (Balibar 1991a; Mignolo, 2009). The only aspect of neo-racism that is “new” is the discourses through which racism is articulated. Moreover, Balibar (1991a) as well as Goldberg (2006, 2015) argue that neo-racism is not a novel form of racism, as this is the state in which racism was practised during the European Enlightenment and in anti-Semitism (also see Gillborn 1995).

Culture, which replaces race in discourses of neo-racism, in this instance acts like nature, “locking individuals and groups a priori into a genealogy, into a determination that is immutable and intangible in origin … the idea of hierarchy is reconstituted in the very type of criteria applied in thinking the difference between cultures” (Balibar 1991a, 22–24) (see also colonial difference, Mignolo, 2009). Neo-racism applies the notion of colonial cultural difference to effect cultural hierarchies that achieve the same division of humanity that is achieved by the pseudo-biological concept of race.

Furthermore, neo-racism, in its claim that race is a thing of the past that should be ignored and substituted with culture, aligns itself with the concept of postraciality, which “amounts to a general

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social ecology within which race and racism are supposedly outmoded but where, in fact, racist expressions have gone viral” (Goldberg 2015, 106). Postraciality, in denying all forms of racism, discredits all forms of naming and seeing racism. It denies the historical conditions and legacy of racism. Under postraciality, race becomes transparent - invisible. This may explain why though it is often difficult to define the Other (non-whites) by their racial category; it is easy to discriminate against them by what cannot be named. Postraciality has made it very easy for people to claim that we are now living in a post-racial society while at the same time refusing to acknowledge that the very society in which they live had ever been racial (Goldberg, 2015). Just as “post” in postcolonial does not mark the end of the colonial, so too “post” in postraciality does not mark the end of raciality (Goldberg, 2015). Rather, denotes a new incarnation of the phenomenon.

The Nordic countries are struggling to incorporate the concept of postraciality into socio-political discourse because claiming to be post-racist means one was formerly racist (see Goldberg, 2015).

In a nutshell, neo-racism and postraciality in Europe are grounded on the denial of racism, where there are no racists and racism is considered a thing of the past (Balibar 1991a; Goldberg 2006) and where race is replaced by culture (Lentin & Titley, 2011). Race is considered an unstable and redundant word that only belongs in history books, and even some history books try to avoid it as far as possible (see Goldberg, 2015). In neo-racism, race (colour) is not important; what is important is culture. The emphasis is on how people from different cultures, rather than people from difference races, interact. Culture, as a thing of the present without the same historical implication as race, is given centre stage (Lentin & Titley 2011; Balibar 1991a) without an investigation of its own weaknesses.

In short, as varied as the understanding of racism is, in this thesis my conception of racism is informed by a postcolonial and neo-racist framework wherein racism is not merely prejudice and discrimination against the Other (often non-white) sustained through power established through colonial history and the socio-political order of a given time. As Rasmussen observes, it is not solely “irrational prejudice, a form of socio-political discrimination, or an ideological motive in a political doctrine; rather, it is a form of government that is designed to manage a population”

(Rasmussen 2011, 34). In this study, racism refers to discrimination or prejudice based on difference, starting from skin colour and reaching out to other variables like gender, sexuality, religion etc., and exercised through the use of power. Racism is a necessary form of rhetoric used to

17 devaluate, and justify as dispensable, lives that are portrayed (by hegemonic discourses) as less valuable. Once again, the bottom line of racism is devaluation and not skin colour. Skin colour is just the marker used to devaluate. Thus, when human beings were commoditised through slavery, they did not just lose their rights but they lost their humanity. Put differently, racism is not about skin colour for the sake of skin colour; it is about the hierarchies and dehumanisation produced by skin colour – what it was, what it is and what it should be.

When literature on racism ignores the role of the state,⁹ it is incomplete, as racism does not exist in a vacuum (see Foucault 1997; Goldberg 2002). As Lentin & Lentin observe, “racism both past and present is inextricably linked both to the policy instituted by states and to the political climate engendered by governmental leaders playing the proverbial ‘race card’” (2006, 2). All nation-states are raced states (Lentin & Lentin 2006; Goldberg 2002), as they are established to serve and protect their citizens’ interest over the interest of others. The borders that define nation states establish the inherent divide between nationals and non-nationals, which in turn sets the tone for citizens to create and maintain the dichotomy between “us” and “them”. This established dichotomy, when pitted against the histories and political climate of a given country, breeds racial tension, which in turns facilitates racism. Balibar’s (1991a) notion of second-class citizenry, who may have been granted the nationality a given state but lack the full rights maintained for “true” citizens, is an example of racism that can be upheld by the state. Zygmunt Bauman’s (1989) metaphor of the gardener who is inclined to weed out the plants he/she did not plant in his garden so that his/her crops can fully benefit from every resource available exemplifies how racism is interwoven into the construct and sustenance of nationhood and nationalism.